Ken Gruebel: Capper novel lacks suspense and excitement

Saturday

Aug 3, 2013 at 12:01 AMAug 3, 2013 at 5:26 PM

I do not remember reading anything by this author, Archer Mayor, and I’m pretty sure I would remember him if I had. He has some twenty two novels credited to him listed in the front of this novel but none of them struck a bell.

Paradise City, by Archer Mayor,Minotaur Books,306pp,$24.99

I do not remember reading anything by this author, Archer Mayor, and I’m pretty sure I would remember him if I had. He has some twenty two novels credited to him listed in the front of this novel but none of them struck a bell.

In this reviewer’s viewpoint one would think that an author would sharpen his craft with that many books. This is not to say this was a bad book or a book without any depth at all, it has plenty of surface gloss but somehow, and I am not sure just how, there is a rather interesting story being told here but pretty much devoid of any real suspense.

It starts out with a good example of what I like to refer to as “the hook.” Three jewel thieves are trying to break into a house by suspending one of their members armed with a glass cutter by a strong rope over a glass roof. The idea is to cut a large circle of glass, this by the thief suspended from the rope. Then that thief will be inside the house, he can unlock the front door and his two fellow thieves can get in the house and virtually clean out anything of value, with the emphasis on jewelry.

It is jewelry they are seeking as they seem to have a means of changing the settings so the stones can be readily marketed and no one will recognize them as famous, or at least well known, pieces of priceless jewelry.

From here on the emphasis is on the woman who has come up with the idea, the jeweler she convinces her system of altering precious jewelry will work and the forced labor she gathers to do the actual work.

I will say this, the author, Archer Mayor, whose day job is a police investigator, does a good job with the police procedural part of the novel. However a little more suspense could have made this good book even better.

Now for the big surprise. I do not have a second book to write about this morning as I am only part way through the current nonfiction book and it will take a full column to do it justice. The title is “The Never Ending War.” It is one mans battle with post-traumatic stress disorder by LM Clark.

One of the reasons I find this book more than interesting, including some rather good writing, is that the crux of the biographical story takes place in Vietnam near Da Nang. While the subject of this nonfiction book was in Vietnam serving in the U.S. Marines, I was there as a civilian photographer, working on a film for my employer, Grumman Aerospace Corporation. While all the Marines were fully armed, I was protected by a little yellow card that stated I was a noncombatant. Luckily for me I did not have to test how well the card would defend me if I needed it.

Every where my camera crew and I went we were pretty well surrounded by those heavily armed Marines, which was comforting to say the least. Be that as it may, I would have gladly swapped my light meter for an even more comforting pistol.

Ken Gruebel lives in New Bern.

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